AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Charles S. Clark

Charles S. Clark joined Government Executive in the fall of 2009. He has been on staff at The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, Time-Life Books, Tax Analysts, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the National Center on Education and the Economy. He has written or edited online news, daily news stories, long features, wire copy, magazines, books and organizational media strategies.

July 19, 2016
The latest in a series of recommendations for the coming presidential transition calls for the next administration to incentivize cross-agency collaboration on strategic systems and accede to the current pressures from Congress to raise the accountability bar for underperforming senior executives. In a report titled “Transition 2016: Equipping the Government...

July 19, 2016
With the electoral campaigns in full swing, the Office of Special Counsel in recent days has announced a series of findings of Hatch Act violations, including one by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. On Monday, the independent investigative and prosecutorial agency sent the White House a report saying...

July 18, 2016
The Pentagon’s efforts to harmonize the information technology systems on which it is spending $38 billion this fiscal year have fallen behind on specifying costs, workforce needs and cybersecurity strategies, a watchdog found. The so-called Joint Information Environment--established in 2010 by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates as an architecture for the...

July 18, 2016
After more than a year of anticipation, the Office of Management and Budget on Friday released updated guidance requiring agencies to step up efforts to reduce risk across their operations. The revised Circular A-123, which dates to 1981, requires agencies to implement an enterprise risk management capability coordinated with the...

July 18, 2016
A Food and Drug Administration employee pleaded guilty to a multi-million-dollar conspiracy to submit false tax returns, the Justice Department announced on July 14. Nafeesah Hines, 46, of Jamaica, N.Y., admitted submitting fraudulent tax returns with two accomplices to collect more than $3.4 million from the Internal Revenue Service from...

July 12, 2016
Phillip Sheridan, a 34-year-old government technology contractor, believes his federal security clearance raises his earning power in the Washington metropolitan area by $30,000. “But it makes you insecure because you think you don’t have skills to compete in Silicon Valley,” he said. In his heart of hearts, he “wants to...

July 8, 2016
The little-known inspector general’s office at the Federal Housing Finance Agency is under fire from two Senate committee chairmen following a reorganization aimed at better targeting of auditing and evaluation resources. Laura Wertheimer, who in 2014 was sworn in at the nearly six-year-old watchdog office that helps monitor $5 trillion...

July 8, 2016
Within months of its enactment, the new law aimed at smoothing the presidential transition may be running into its first challenge as a result of the Hillary Clinton email scandal. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Wednesday wrote to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asking that he “refrain from...

July 7, 2016
Amid the fireworks at Thursday’s House hearing featuring FBI Director James Comey came a dispute—largely along partisan lines---about the sophistication of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Republican agenda on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to grill Comey on whether politics tinged his decision not to prosecute...

July 7, 2016
Just after Midnight Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House passed a package of seven bills aimed at holding federal employees accountable for poor performance or misconduct. The largely party-line vote was 241-181. The Government Reform and Improvement Act (H.R. 4361), originally sponsored by Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., would ease the suspension or...